Building a European Identity in Development Cooperation

What are the priorities of the Practitioners’ Network for European Development Cooperation? The group meets annually to discuss how to put aid policy into practice, and includes 13 member organisations who account for 70 per cent of the official development assistance of the European Union.

At a recent meeting in Vienna the presidency of the network passed to the French Development Agency (Agence Française de Développement – AFD) and its executive director for international relations and partnerships, Catherine Garreta, spoke with capacity4dev about her plans.

“One of the objectives is to get to know one another better, and to have a good level of practical and technical discussion with the European Commission,” Ms Garreta said. “But it’s also to contribute to a real European identity in terms of development, and to work with the Commission to build this European approach to development... That’s the ultimate ambition of this network, to build that identity.”

“It’s important because the aid landscape today is very fragmented, more and more. Aid is questioned, there are a number of strategic considerations about what aid will be tomorrow? ... It’s important to remember that Europe is the largest donor of development aid. It’s important that Europe has an identity, intellectually and at the level of its strategies, objectives, and projects, and implementation of concrete projects in countries.”

The network also facilitates knowledge sharing, with Ms Garreta conveying AFD’s recent success in ensuring the positive environmental and social consequences of development projects.

“We’ve made lots of progress raising our standards and our requirements,” Ms Garreta said. “What we’ve noticed however, despite everything, is that our requirements have not been taken into consideration in the implementation of projects. For example, once we have approved an environmental and social management plan we don’t necessarily have the means to ensure it is well implemented.”

“So what we have started to do is include conditions in our tender offers such that we now have the same skill requirements for environmental and social management as we have for the technical expertise of companies who bid for the contract. So we check that the businesses competing on the market have the skills and the references themselves to implement the management plan and take into account these demands.”

Ms Garreta gave the example of a sanitisation project in Douala, Cameroon, the first project  to use similar clauses. Other pilot projects are under preparation, including two with the German development bank KfW. The AFD is exploring how to include such conditions in pilot projects co-financed with the European Commission.

Ms Garreta said considering environmental and social impact is important to building the capacity of developing countries to check that future projects are well implemented.

“This allows us to convey a positive image of Europe: that one aspect of our aid is to lift the competitive conditions and check that the environmental and social clauses are not left for dead but implemented concretely in projects.”

Image: Otalia Sacko

This collaborative piece was drafted with input from Catherine Garreta, and Paul Riembault from EuropeAid, with support from the capacity4dev.eu Coordination Team. Teaser image courtesy of Otalia Sacko.